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Title: How To Justify Workplace Theft Author: CrimethInc. Date: 14th April 2020 Language: en Topics: illegalism, how to, theft, direct action, workplace struggles Source: Retrieved on 9th September 2020 from https://archive.org/details/workplacetheft-web
Whether aware of it or not, your boss is stealing from you every
paycheck. Employers profit off of the “excess” wealth that you, as an
employee, produce. There are two ways to get paid in America: make money
off the work you do, or make money off the work that other people do.
Employees generate wealth, employers collect it.
We live in a capitalist society. We all know that. Most people are okay
with it, too. After all, the competition (state communism like the USSR)
doesn’t have such a good reputation.
But what exactly does capitalism mean? Our good friend the dictionary
says capitalism is “an economic and political system in which a
country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for
profit, rather than by the state.” This definition is a bit deceptive,
but let’s run with it for now.
The word I care about in that definition is “profit.” Profit is the
extra money at the top after all your expenses are paid out. You buy ten
apples from the farmer for ten cents each and sell them in town for
twenty cents each, leaving you with an extra dollar. Hurrah! You make
enough of those dollars, and you can pay your rent and afford to eat.
Both things you might need.
But you can only carry so many apples, and you can only sell them so
fast. You could make more money if you hire other people to sell the
apples for you. You pay them an hourly wage, or take a cut off of every
apple they sell. Multiply this by enough people, and suddenly you’re
quite wealthy. The people you hire only have enough to pay rent and eat,
but you get to drive a hummer-limo and smoke Cuban cigars or whatever.
Why? Because you stole from your employees. You aren’t working harder
than them—in fact, you’re probably working less—and derive your income
from the excess wealth generated by their labor.
And that is capitalism. When rich people steal from poor people through
the legal process of wage labor. Capitalism is based on “capital.”
Capital is wealth that can be used to generate more wealth. If
capitalism was about getting rewarded for working, we’d be all about it.
But it’s not. it’s about getting rewarded for other people working, it’s
about letting money (and people) make your money for you.
If you, as a wage laborer, didn’t create more wealth for your boss than
your hourly wage, you wouldn’t have a job. What we’re calling workplace
theft is actually a bit of a misnomer. Workplace theft is the norm: your
bosses are stealing from you every day. They’re living off your sweat.
When you take money out of the register and put it into your pocket,
that’s not workplace theft. That’s workplace justice.
This isn’t the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, you could
argue. Your boss might not be buying diamond-studded collars for his
dog, might not be throwing $20,000 dinners for all her friends, ft could
be said that most employers aren’t in it for the top hats and monocles.
They’re in it because they care about culture or books or food or
whatever it is they promote through their store. Good for them.
There’s no use arguing that store owners need to be thrown up against a
wall and shot. That honor is reserved for the rich bastards who really
do run world politics for their own ends regardless of the ecological or
social atrocities they leave in their collective wake—the billionaires,
the heads of major industries, the corrupt politicians. Hell, small
business owners probably don’t even need to be seen as villains. They’re
just petty thieves—and they might even be petty thieves who don’t know
they’re stealing.
If a business isn’t doing so well, it’s run by petty thieves who are
failing. They would like to steal your money by paying you less than you
earn them, but they can’t, not yet. I don’t know about you, but a
burglar who can’t figure out how to open the window of my house still
isn’t my friend.
Sure, you don’t have to work any given job. But you’ve got to work
somewhere.
Bosses like to sleep at night, just like everyone else. Bosses like to
think that people need jobs, that they provide jobs. “If you don’t like
the pay, don’t work here.”
It’s a shame that the modern labor movement is a shambles, that the most
of the existing labor unions are hopelessly bureaucratic and
lily-livered, because a hundred years ago they showed the world the
falsity of that claim with remarkable articulateness. The short of it
is: you gotta work or you don’t eat. There are ways around it that
individuals will find, but by and large, you don’t have a choice. You
need a job. If it’s not one crummy job, it’s another. And most anywhere
you go, there will be bosses. There’s an entire class of professional
thieves just waiting to siphon away the products of your labor, ready to
buy your time (let’s be honest, your life) for as little as they can get
away with.
If you’re ready to defend yourselves from these thieves, these bosses,
then there are a few ways you can go about it.
Not Working: The purest and, at first glance, simplest solution. Stop
selling your time. In the US at least, there is plenty of edible food
thrown out each night by grocery stores. Or you can grow food in empty
lots. There are abandoned buildings to live in. You and your friends can
teach each other the skills necessary to live, to thrive. Some stuff,
though, like dentistry, is going to be hard. And squatting is usually
frowned upon by property owners (they would much prefer that you paid
them for the honor of residing on their property, once again trying to
make a buck off of you without lifting a finger). But at least no boss
will get to steal from you.
Collective Bargaining: You and your co-workers can organize with unions.
You can stand up for yourselves, you can show your employer that the
system only works because of your input. The reason you might have an
eight- hour work day (though it seems most Americans don’t anymore) is
because union members refused to work endless hours and were shot or
hanged for it. If you want a chance to argue for your fair share of the
wealth that you have created, you’re won’t be able to do it alone.
You’ll need your friends. You’ll need solidarity from folks you’ve never
met before. Try the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for a union
that isn’t just trying to create a comfortable niche for itself within
capitalism.
Worker Cooperatives: We don’t need bosses. You can set up your own
businesses and organize without artificial hierarchy. There are worker
cooperatives all over the world, and most would be excited to help you
understand how to set up your own.
Theft: If you don’t have the nerve (or have too many responsibilities,
or are really quite fond of your teeth) to drop out of capitalist
society entirely, you’re no good at organizing or your co-workers are
apathetic, and you don’t have the capital or commitment to start your
own cooperative, then, well, just take back what’s yours. Its simple.
Steal from your bosses, because your bosses are sure as hell stealing
from you.
None of these options are long-term solutions. We live in a civilization
based on the separation of society into haves and have-nots. This cannot
be allowed to continue.
The entirety of potential political and social structures don’t balance
on the axis of capitalism (and democracy, somehow always lumped with
capitalism) and state communism. Capitalists would love for you to
believe that, of course, because state communism is so clearly a
terrible idea; they would love for people to think capitalism is the
only alternative to Stalinist atrocity.
Capitalism is an atrocity, however, as a quick survey will let us know.
Capitalism (the idea of not working for your money, but instead
siphoning the wealth produced by others) has led us to the very brink of
planetary ecocide with its mindless search for profit (a feature
included even in the dictionary definition!).
Many people have theorized ways of eradicating the rampant criminality
of capitalism. Socialism isn’t actually a dirty word, and can mean a
whole host of things, many of which are as far from Stalinism as a
system could possibly be.
But the simplest one is this: we, as small communities (often
overlapping ones), can make decisions for ourselves by the means we best
see fit. We can feed and care for ourselves and each other. We can work
in ways that make us happy, we can work for projects that actually
concern us. If we don’t let the ruling class rule us, we won’t be ruled.
If you ask me, I’d call this system anarchism. Other people might call
it different things like autonomism or horizontalism or just
decentralization, direct democracy, or common sense.
But in order to do this, we have to take back the means of production.
The rich have the things they have because they are dirty stinking
thieves, whether they know it or not.
just a friendly word from some anarchists